Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: Fatwa time – baby!

A long time ago, when I was younger lad and less a man of the world, I had something happen that has allowed me to always have a good chuckle whenever I thought back to it. I was at a convention with a few buddies that I will say were of the “heftier” variety, and these gents could eat. As you can guess, their favorite routine was to hit an “All you can eat buffet” and just clean the place up. I loved watching these guys that all outweighed me by lover 120lbs or more, sit down and just clean out the entire buffet offering of this Chinese place in under 30 mins flat. It got so bad that one day the owner freaked out, started calling them killer whales, because he associated killer whales with an animal that eat everything in sight I guess, and proceeded to scold them about the fact that an “All you can eat buffet” implies it’s all you can eat, not eat all you can, and it was all done in broken English. As if there was a difference to these fellas. They looked up like a bunch of cows that have their grazing interrupted, and one of them, the 6′ 4″ nearly 350lbs giant of a guy – the meekest one of the bunch I add, which is why it was so funny – just told the poor fella in a booming voice: more food please! Then poor guy lost it and threw us all out, banning my buddies for life, all the while screaming about how they were putting him out of business. Seriously strange shit.

A Saudi cleric named Saleh al-Fawzan has issued fatwa against all-you-can-eat buffets in Saudi Arabia. He made the statement on a Saudi Quranic TV station.

Fawzan said the value and quantity of the food sold should be pre-determined before hand.

“Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” Fawzan was quoted on al-Atheer channel.

Maybe that Chinese restaurant guy went to Saudi Arabia after his place closed down from the people grazing at the “All you can eat buffet” (that’s how my buddies would tell the wait staff to seat them when they went there “X amount of people for grazing”) and he finally found a sympathetic ear to his plight. Who knows.